Blacks Should Never Give Up their Guns

All Gun Control is Oppressive

Second Amendment

BLACKS SHOULD NEVER GIVE UP THEIR GUNS

All Gun Control is Oppressive

Connie Morgan

Following a horrific mass shooting, like the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27, or the mall shooting in Allen, Texas on May 6, I would prefer not to immediately launch into a conversation about gun control. I would rather respect the victims by not promptly using their deaths to forward a political agenda. I would rather discuss the events and culture that lead to a person picking up weapons with the intent to kill innocent people. I would rather discuss ways establishments open to the public can deter would-be shooters. I would rather have a conversation about mental illness treatment and prevention. I would prefer to learn about the uniquely effective Nashville police training so that we can replicate it across the nation. 

These druthers be what they may, one conversation I refuse to have following a mass shooting is one that proposes infringing the rights of law-abiding citizens, particularly a right critical to protecting the liberty of groups especially vulnerable to oppression. Unfortunately, immediately following every mass shooting comes the suggestion that we need more gun control. It is worth remembering why black people in particular should be vehemently opposed to this idea.

Purpose and history are what black people should consider when discussing gun restrictions. When a shooting like the ones in Nashville or Allen, Texas happens, even gun rights activists can get distracted by discourse that strays from the foundational purpose of gun rights. Weapon lethality, general violence statistics, and firearm definitions are debated. 

Figure 1

The supposed danger of gun-free zones is currently a hot topic. Since 1950 an estimated 94% of mass public shootings in the United States have occurred in gun-free zones (fig. 1). Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently pointed this out and is proposing legislation to allow school staff to carry. This is an idea worth exploring if the topic is general school or gun safety but when it comes to the debate on gun control this kind of argument is a distraction. The foundational purpose of gun rights in America is not to protect ourselves from fellow civilians. 

Hunting, general home protection, and recreation are all American values that come out of the Second Amendment of the Constitution. They are not the core reason the Amendment exists. The Amendment reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.  

Notice how it doesn’t say the Second Amendment is necessary to your personal safety. This Amendment concerns the security of a free State. There’s an old saying: “What can a government do after it takes away the population’s guns? Anything it wants.” The founding fathers understood that one of the first things a tyrant must do in order to control the people is remove the guns. Hitler did it. Disarmament followed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Gun confiscation followed Castro’s takeover in Cuba. In recent years Venezuelans have paid the price for losing their right to bear arms. Mao allegedly said:

All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party must command all the guns; that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.  

The “gun issue” is a uniquely American issue because America is a uniquely free country. An authoritarian or fascist government in the U.S. would have a hell of a time overcoming the citizenry through violent means. Historically, violence is the only way a dictator can gain and maintain control. 

Every policy decision is about tradeoffs. Perhaps a national gun grab would dramatically decrease school shootings. (This is debatable as there are an estimated 393 million guns in the U.S., only 6.06 million of which are legally registered, and 90% of those imprisoned for possession of a firearm obtained it illegally.) The tradeoff is that the risk of an authoritarian or fascist government takeover or military coup dramatically increases. Indeed, even barring a takeover, the risk that even a democratically legitimate government oppresses its citizens increases if those citizens are without means of self-defense. Americans have lived fat and happy for a long time now. We are not a particularly old people. Unlike some societies that go back many centuries, and have suffered much tyranny, we underestimate the uniqueness of our inexperience with at-home tyrannical threats. To keep a state both free and secure, citizens must be able to defend themselves against abuses by the state itself.

Once one understands the purpose of the second amendment, unpacking the history of gun control around the world reveals a predictably tragic pattern. Black people and other minorities should pay attention to this history. When fascist governments take over it is the minority populations that suffer first and suffer worst. People often point to Hitler and the Jews as the prime example of this but there are others. Famously, the Armenian Genocide took place after disarmament. Armenians represented about 10% of the population of the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, in the absence of a fascist takeover, armed agents of even free states have a history of abusing minorities, which is why the Black Panthers, for example, fought for the right to bear arms and carried their guns in public as they “policed the police.” 

Gun regulation doesn’t affect the affluent. Wealthy, powerful people will always have guns. Gun regulations disproportionately affect those in the minority or those with the least power. When we look at history—and we shall go through some examples presently—we see that whether in the form of large scale gun grabs or subtler “common sense” gun regulation, these policies began with the explicit goal of weakening minority groups. Whether intentional or not, gun restriction policies risk having the same effect today.

After the Civil War one of the largest fears amongst many of the white majority in America was that freed slaves would acquire guns. Many Southern states enacted “Black Codes” to keep blacks in submission. Keeping guns out of black hands was an important part of this. Excerpt from Mississippi Black Codes:

…no freedman, free negro or mulatto…shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife, and on conviction thereof in the county court shall be punished by fine.

It is far more difficult to control and intimidate a group of people if they are armed. The first gun-control group in the U.S. was the Ku Klux Klan. Anywhere the KKK had significant presence, “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless,” recounted civil rights attorney Albion Tourgée, who represented Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson. In what amounts to a shining moment in U.S. history, Congress responded to Black Codes with the Fourteenth Amendment, which forced Southern states to repeal laws forbidding blacks to own guns. 

Local governments still have the power to restrict gun ownership and often do so despite the fact that it is legally trickier. Few know that Martin Luther King, Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed handgun after his home was firebombed in 1956. Alabama clergy denied his request, deeming him “unsuitable.” There were also efforts to disarm the Black Panthers.

Just like today, gun regulation legislation in the past adapted itself to legal barriers to gun control. Instead of banning guns outright, purchasing a firearm was simply made more difficult for those in lower classes. In 1871, Tennessee was the first of many southern states to pass a facially neutral gun law that made purchasing weapons more expensive. The  “Army and Navy” law, barred the sale of any guns except the expensive “Army and Navy model.” The obvious effect of this was that while ex-Confederate soldiers already had high-quality guns, recently freed blacks could not afford these weapons. Due to the new law, lower-cost weapons were illegal for blacks to purchase. 

Southern Jim Crow laws are the foundation of gun control in America and these ideas did spread north. Early northern gun laws weren’t always motivated by racism against blacks. Laws outside the South sometimes targeted Italians, Jews, or even labor agitators in California. 

Figure 2

Making gun ownership more complicated is a common gun control tactic today. Tweets like this one (fig. 2) get tens of thousands of likes. Yet the consequences of such legislation to massively tax guns and ammunition would be to widen the class divide. The more expensive and difficult gun ownership is made, the more it becomes an elite privilege. Politicians and the wealthy will never be without firearms under such proposals but the poor and marginalized will be. How can a political group that largely wants to “eat the rich” reconcile making the wealthy class even more disproportionately powerful?

There is a funny moment in the movie “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (A slasher horror-comedy that is a refreshingly insightful observation of Gen Z) where a girl finds a gun in the house of a very wealthy supposed “good liberal.” While the rest of the cast is shocked that a guy on “their side” would have a firearm in his home, the based character rolls her eyes. “He's super rich, of course he has a gun.” This is what we all know to be true. The wealthy and well-connected have an abundance of guns, weapon systems, bunkers, and safe rooms. Gun laws will not affect their safety but they will affect regular people’s liberty. Weapons are one of the best equalizers of class discrepancies in self-protection and liberty.

Calls for gun control are almost always followed by calls for abolishing the National Rifle Association. Black people should be informed on the history of the NRA. The NRA fought against discretionary gun restrictions like the one used against Dr. King. Before the passing of the Civil Rights Act, the NRA gave charters to blacks seeking to protect themselves against racist attacks. Civil rights hero Robert F. Williams was one of the black Americans supported by the NRA. With his NRA charter Williams formed the Black Armed Guard and fought off deadly attacks from the KKK. His book Negroes With Guns is worth a read (fig. 3). 

Figure 3

Those who argue for gun regulation are often those who call for the destruction of police departments. I’m no police abolitionist but I think police reform is certainly warranted. If folks on the left, right, and center can agree that police departments are power centers capable of corruption, why would we want these officers of the state to be the only ones armed? How does one reconcile the belief that cops are racist with stripping guns from the hands of law abiding blacks and other ethnic minorities? The Black Panthers saw this clearly 70 years ago.

Minority and/or traditionally less powerful groups of all stripes are increasingly forming pro-gun organizations. This includes black groups such as the National African-American Gun Association and Black Guns Matter. LGBT identifying folks and women are also a growing gun ownership block. Gun ownership, like so much else in America, is diverse and transcends personal identity borders.

Anyone concerned about or simply leery of government overreach, corruption and/or malfeasance should be passionately against handing the same government a monopoly on gun violence. I know too much about our founding principles and about worldwide disarmament to voluntarily give up my right to firearms. I pay attention to the lessons of history, so I know that being a Christian, woman, and ethnic minority places me in numerous historically persecuted categories. Someone once said all gun control is racist. But gun control isn’t merely racist: it’s far more universally oppressive than that.

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Connie Morgan is a Christian, wife, and mother located in the Pacific Northwest. She has a background in economics and public relations and has worked in higher ed, marketing, and tech. She served five years in the United States military as a military intelligence officer. She is a co-founder of Free Black Thought and a co-editor of the Journal of Free Black Thought. Her main research and writing interests are the family, education, and personal liberty generally. She has written for the Journal of Free Black Thought about education, home schooling, and a wide variety of other issues. Follow her on Twitter and subscribe to her new Substack.